How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

As you probably know, Dodo Pizza Oxford doesn’t take orders via phone—we decided to cut off the landline to save money. As a sort of bonus, now we have plenty of information about our customers. The Internet knows everything, and our website for Oxford has been up and running for more than three months. So we dove into the data hoping to glean a few meaningful insights about our customers and their needs. Spoiler: the effort has totally paid off.

1. How do people access our website?

Over 40% of our visitors get to the website by directly typing its URL into a browser. This is either our loyal audience or people who have already heard of us before and remembered the name of the website. Surprisingly, the percentage of traffic coming from social networks is rather low (less than 3%) despite the fact that Dodo Pizza Oxford is relatively big on Facebook for a small, local pizzeria (though we have never tried to push sales through that channel, using it mostly for sharing our story).

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2.  What devices do visitors use?

Over 65% of the audience uses smartphones or tablets to access our website. When we just started in Oxford, the numbers were different. 60% were placing orders using desktop computers, and only 40% used either smartphones or tablets. Smartphones are obviously taking over.

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3. Who are our customers?

Oxford is a college town where you’d probably expect the vast majority of pizza places’ customers to be college kids around 18–24. But 57.7% of our users are in the age group 25–34. This can be explained by the fact that the prices of our pizzas are higher than our closest competitors’. People are paying for the quality they value, and quality is never cheap, right? Customers in their late twenties and mid-thirties have more money to spend on food, and they have kids for whom they choose the best. Surprisingly, pizza seems to be a guys’ thing. Ladies only account for 21.3% of all visits.

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4. How much time do people spend on our website?

The average time visitors spend on our website is 4.5 minutes. You can definitely order a pizza faster, but if you’re doing it for the first time and you aren’t very familiar with the website, you can easily take a few minutes. The average time spent on the website for someone who has placed an order before is less than 1.5 minutes.

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5. How many people actually buy a pizza?

The conversion rate is one of the most important indicators of a website’s success. It demonstrates the percentage of people who actually place an order out of all the users visiting the website. When we just started in March, we had a lower conversion rate (17%) than what we see now—mostly due to the fact that a lot of people were just curios about the business in general and never placed orders. Nowadays, a quarter of all the visitors end up coming through and getting a pizza.

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6. Where do people on the website go?

The Clicks map shows the areas of the website people click most and least. The good news is that all seven of our pizzas have their own audience—with the Pepperoni and Supreme being the most popular. Despite the fact that we have over 170 reviews on Facebook, people almost never check the Facebook link at the very top (seems like they trust us with the average score number), but they are eager to read more about the company.

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7. When do the customers want to eat?

In May, after almost two months of operation, we changed our business hours from 11 am — 10 pm to 4 pm — 12:30 am. The decision was more of a necessity simply because our crew wasn’t ready to work a full day at that time. But as we can see, despite the fact that customers are more interested in eating a pizza at later hours than during the day, there are also lots of hungry people around lunch time.

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Time for the conclusions.

• Our top priority is to stay open for longer hours to serve both lunch and late dinners as soon as possible. Nobody likes losing money.
• We’ll focus on the mobile website and make it even more user-friendly.
• We should definitely do a better job of reaching out to students. Oxford is a college town, after all.
• Dodo Oxford probably needs to reshape its Facebook strategy. Many folks in town haven’t heard of us, and our page is a great tool to let them know that we’re here.
• Finally, we have to work on the time people spend on the website. These numbers will be the main metrics we’ll be using to measure the impact of future improvements.

Having no phone ordering at a pizza store might actually sound like a suicide mission, but we look at it as an opportunity. Losing some customers who aren’t so familiar with the Internet today will force us to build loyal long-term relationships with a younger audience. The Internet is the future, and this is exactly where we want to be.

Will we ever get there? We’ll see.